Recently, a service concept called a document management system (to be referred to as DMS hereinafter) which facilitates search of document information overflowing in an office by rearranging and storing them as a database is brought into conversation more often than before.
One possible reason is that pieces of information (documents) have been exchanged by paper media until recently, but these documents keep building up, and it is very troublesome to search a large number of documents for necessary information. Another reason is that the use of paper media makes it difficult to share documents among many people.
On the other hand, it is prescribed by law that some documents related to financial affairs and taxation business be preserved as paper media. With the advance of the IT-oriented society, however, a law which allows preserved scan data obtained by electronizing documents to be regarded as legally evidential is beginning to be enforced. A requirement of these laws is a mechanism which prevents tampering of scan data obtained by electronizing documents. Another requirement is a scanning function for faithfully reproducing documents having existed as paper media when electronized scan data is viewed by an image viewer application or the like. Techniques such as an electronic signature and time stamp are used to prevent tampering of scan data. The reproduction quality of electronized documents depends on a scanner apparatus and scanning conditions.
The law which allows documents having existed as paper media to be electronized and preserved often specifies the certificate authority (CA) of an electronic certificate necessary to generate an electronic signature for preventing tampering of scan data, in accordance with the guideline indicated by each public agency. Also, since various types of paper media are used, the scanning conditions must be set in accordance with paper media themselves in order to faithfully reproduce documents.
There is a known technique by which a sheet for giving scan instructions is inserted as the first page of document pages as objects of main scan, thereby notifying a scanner apparatus of the reading conditions of the following document pages to be mainly scanned without causing the user to designate the scanning conditions every time (e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-354212).
In the technique disclosed in the above reference, however, a special sheet must be prepared. In addition, the user must know which guideline indicated by a public agency a paper medium to be read matches.
Furthermore, to verify the contents of scan data preserved before, a document to be verified is searched by using the attribute information of the document as a keyword. However, the attribute information of a document to be preserved together with scan data changes from one document type to another. This makes it difficult for a user to recognize the document attribute information to be preserved in relation to the document type.
Also, in a document management server which preserves scan data obtained by reading document pages, a database must be manually designed so that document attributes corresponding to document types can be preserved.